During his 40 years studying agriculture and development in China, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) Rural Education Action Program (REAP) co-director Scott Rozelle realized that something wasn’t quite adding up. Despite numerous interventions — from providing scholarships to hiring better teachers — many rural schoolchildren were still struggling to learn.
In 2009, Rochelle and his team uncovered that young people in China were affected by extremely high rates of anemia that it was having a massive impact on their ability to concentrate.
“ China invests enormous amounts of money to bring better teachers, and they build new schools and guess what — it has almost no impact because the kids are sick,” Rozelle said.
Through testing different interventions, the team found that solutions as simple as vitamin supplements significantly reduced anemia rates and improved math scores.
After presenting their findings to the Chinese government, a new nationwide free school lunch program was implemented in 2013. Since then, studies have shown a significant reduction in anemia rates among disadvantaged rural schoolchildren.
“I’m really proud of that work,” Rozelle said.
Rozelle’s path began far from China itself, in the suburb of Bellflower, Calif., where he started learning Chinese in junior high. This early exposure led him to attend Taiwan University as an undergraduate exchange student for three years. “That’s where I really learned my Chinese,” said Rozelle, who now speaks Mandarin fluently.
As Sino-American relations warmed and China began opening up in the 1980s, Rozelle, a then PhD student at Cornell University, was invited by Nanjing University to teach foreign economics in China. “ They invited me to come over very early,” he said.
After earning his doctorate in 1990, Rozelle started working at Stanford — first as an assistant professor at the Food Research Institute and Department of Economics and then as professorial chair at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies.
At first, his work centered on the economics of agriculture in China. He then partnered with Jikun Huang, a fellow economist he’d met during his graduate years, to co-found the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy.
Their collaboration was “complementary,” Huang said. “My strengths lay in working with regression models, and his lay in writing. [He] could finish a first draft on a flight from Beijing to the United States.”
To Huang, however, what truly set Rozelle apart was his commitment to interacting with local farmers on the ground. Unlike many other international collaborators, Rozelle would go into the villages to understand the situation, Huang said.
What impressed Huang more was Rozelle’s broader vision for the Chinese economy. “He believes that improving China will have implications for other countries indirectly,” Huang said.
In 2008, Rozelle received the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology’s cooperation award. “Professor Rozelle has made outstanding contributions to China’s establishment of a world-class research team and the training of outstanding agricultural economists,” noted the Ministry. A year later, he won the friendship award — the highest governmental honor a non-Chinese national can achieve.
Having spent his career studying China’s development, Rozelle has witnessed the country’s growth spurts and growing pains. “ China’s been five different countries over the past 40 years,” he said.
When Rozelle first arrived, the rural Chinese lived in people’s communes (人民公社), where land, labor and resources were collectivized and members received grain rations in compensation. “China knew nothing about the outside world,” Rozelle recalled. “I’d go into these villages and have 50 kids following me and touching my arm to look, [asking] ‘what is this hair on your arm?’”
But change came quickly. Government reforms incentivized production, leading to output doubling, and as the country rapidly developed, the rural community’s needs also evolved over time.
“ Suddenly I looked up and I saw agriculture now fall into less than 15% of [China’s] GDP,” he said. The country’s next challenge, Rozelle decided, wasn’t food, but people. “ That’s when I started working on rural education,” he said. This brought him to REAP and his research on anemia.
Today, Rozelle’s work has shifted again, to focus on the problem of intellectual development in young rural children.
In 2017, Rozelle delivered a speech titled “The reality is that 63% of rural children have never attended high school. What should we do?” (现实是有63%的农村孩子一天高中都没上过，怎么办), arguing that flawed early childhood education and health are primary culprits in rural China’s human capital problem.
The speech sparked intense debate among the Chinese public about the problem of stimulating children’s brain development, as well as about the validity of Rozelle’s statistics.
Throughout his research, Rozelle’s core message has always stayed the same: “The kids are healthy, but they’re still not learning,” he said. With his future work, he hopes to change that.